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Saturday, November 22, 2014

John Kennedy, even with his publicly reported physical frailties, was a man with an almost mythical presence. He was young and vibrant, he had a beautiful wife and two small children, and, true or not, we perceived him as the peoples' president--as close to being one of us, his wealth notwithstanding, as we were likely to get. He was the FDR we had been wishing for.

It was accepted, we thought, that modern American presidents didn't die from assassin's bullets. It was unthinkable. But John Kennedy did. Walter Cronkite broke the news to us and we were forced to believe it: At 1:00 P.M. Central Standard Time, on November 22, 1963, in Parkland Hospital, Dallas, Texas, the president died .

Not long after the announcement my seven-year-old ran into the house, wild-eyed and gasping. "The principal said we had to go home," my daughter told us. "They said to hurry. I was so scared."

My little girl ran all the way, a half-mile from the school to our house. Her fears were local; she couldn't fathom that much commotion unless it meant that something bad had happened to her family. The death of a president was not something she needed to worry about, but the sight of her sobbing mother made her knees buckle and she joined in, crying because I was crying.

I cried for three days; not continuously, since we had two small children who needed reassuring, but my daughter, middle-aged now, remembers that for the first time in her life she felt fear in her own house.

The TV was on from morning until night. We watched Lyndon Johnson being sworn in as president aboard Air Force One. Too soon. Too soon! We're not ready to call him president. Impossible to avoid the bloodstains on Jackie's pink bouclé suit as she stood silent nearby. It seemed such a brave, foolish, poignant thing to do, to continue to wear that suit still showing traces of her husband's splattered brain. Even those who had seen the First Lady as a bit of an extraneous butterfly now held her to their hearts.

We watched the funeral--the riderless horse; Jackie in her heavy black veil, eyes hollow, staring straight ahead as John's grieving brother, Robert, held her arm; John-John, sweet little boy, saluting his father's casket. We watched as a procession of dignitaries followed along behind, someone's somber voice announcing their names as they passed by the television cameras. For a few brief moments we found respite in trying to identify the Washington celebrities by sight before they were announced. But, as happened many times throughout those terrible days, reality set in: Our president, Jack Kennedy, had been murdered.

Later we watched the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald enter the jail, arms held by two armed guards, and then watched in horror as a man, later identified as Jack Ruby, lunged in front of the camera and shot Oswald dead.

Rumors flew; it was a conspiracy and not the work of a lone gunman. Oswald knew too much. Ruby had ties to the mob. Castro had orchestrated this from Cuba. The Soviets were involved. Others would die. Nobody was safe.

We didn't lose our innocence on that day. We hadn't been living in a fairy tale world. We had lived through WWII, had feared the Hydrogen Bomb, had been glued to the TV during the Cuban Missile Crisis, had watched as our country botched the invasion at the Bay of Pigs. U.S troops were in Vietnam and anti-war rallies were sprouting up all over the country. The civil rights movement was growing and with it came long-hidden truths about the institutionalized brutality against blacks.

We lived with uncertainty, but it was tempered and presented to us in black and white on our televisions and in the pages of Life Magazine. We had no 24-hour-a-day news channels. No internet. Our newspapers were thick with other things to distract us. We could turn it on and turn it off.

But on November 22, 1963 everything changed. We were embarking on a journey with a new president nobody wanted and nobody trusted. Our fear turned to cynicism and instead of a country held together by the pain of an assassination, we became a country torn apart by anger and distrust. The Warren Report, the exhaustive study of the Kennedy assassination, brought more doubt than closure. Three civil rights workers were murdered the following year in Mississippi and the South became a furious battleground. Vietnam war protesters took to the streets by the thousands as the war escalated and the draft forced our children into deadly battles they couldn't believe in. The underground drug culture came up for air and flourished. And in 1968, five years after John Kennedy was killed, we lost two more good men to assassins' bullets--Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

We'll never know where we would be today if on that fated day in November those bullets fired from the Dallas Book Depository hadn't hit their mark, but we do know we didn't get over it. We couldn't close the book; we couldn't change the channel. Our president had been assassinated and for far too long afterward our world was an ugly place.

Now, 51 years later, we're hearing about White House breaches where people with weapons are getting too close to our president before they're stopped and the same fear surfaces from a half-century ago. I'm afraid for Barack Obama.

The level of murderous hatred toward this man is far beyond anything I've ever witnessed in my lifetime. I would like to think much of it is an act, made easier because one can remain hidden and anonymous and penalty-free on the internet, but I know all it takes is one lone gunman hell-bent on killing the president.

I want every person who ever publicly threatens the president, or wishes out loud for his death, to be found and questioned and made to prove he or she has no real intentions. I want those threats to be taken seriously.

I want us to stop interpreting the First Amendment to mean there are no consequences for advocating for the death of the President of the United States. We have given the highest honor in the land--the presidency--to a man named Barack Obama. He is a good man, but even if he weren't, we, as citizens of the country he was elected to head, have an obligation to make sure our president is kept safe. This president. Any president.

Monday, November 10, 2014

It's been almost a week since the mid-term elections and you may or may not have noticed that this space has been empty. Deserted. Lights out. Nobody home.

It wasn't because I'm chicken about expressing how I feel about what happened last Tuesday. That's not it. I kept trying, but I honestly had nothing coherent to say about it. I wrote an entire blog post on Wednesday morning and almost hit the "Publish" button before I realized that it was nothing but one big whine. A total waste of time. We didn't just lose an election, we lost in such a devastating, humiliating slam-dunk of a rout, I felt as if I have been physically beaten. I couldn't catch my breath, it hurt so bad. The only thing I could think to do was to lay low and do nothing.

It worked out that there were other things going on in my life that distracted me enough so that going off the deep end wasn't an option. For the first two days I deliberately stayed away from the blame games, the prognosticating, the clueless reporting of the results--as if it wasn't the worst thing in the world that the Republicans skunked us. All across the country. The undeserving bastards SKUNKED US!!!!

But, okay.

I was not the only one to take the loss personally. A whole lot of cussin' going on out there. And blaming. Mostly at the Democrats who apparently let this happen, either by choosing bad candidates, by running hopelessly out-of-touch campaigns, or by being pseudo-Democrats who pretended they cared but didn't feel the need to actually go out and vote.

For once it wasn't Obama's fault, it was the fault of the Democrats who moved away from Obama in order to have a chance at winning in Obama-hostile states. Unless you believe it was Obama's fault for not giving those Dems reason enough to want to include him in their quest, as representatives of his party, to win a seat on the Democratic side.

There is plenty of blame to go around and all of the principals deserve a portion of the flak, but the bottom line is that the Republicans are now in charge of everything but the executive branch of our government, and the big unknown is how the executive branch will handle it. The truth is, President Obama doesn't follow a predictable path. He doesn't even follow a Party path. He is the epitome of the Big Unknown. Will he now suddenly become our 21st Century FDR? I wish. But no, he won't.

Will the Republicans suddenly come to their senses and realize they have two years to attempt to fix the damage they've already done, hoping that by 2016 we'll forget that they're the enemy and give them a chance at owning the entire government? No to the first part but yes to the last.

I want to quit. I'm tired and mad and demoralized and hurt. But it's like voting. If I stay home, deciding my vote won't count, it won't. If I decide my voice won't count, it won't. My singular voice doesn't count, but if I add it to the thousands of others who can't and won't give up now, we might just make a difference.

It's the hopeless optimists the Republicans have to fear. We've always been their undoing.

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From Political Loud Mouth

"If by a 'Liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people - their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties - someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a 'Liberal', then I'm proud to say I'm a Liberal."

-John Kennedy

Any Other Questions??

"Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things...every one! So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, 'Liberal,' as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won't work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor." -- Written by Lawrence O'Donnell and spoken by Jimmy Smits as Matt Santos on The West Wing

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